Come Unto These Yellow Sands Read Online Free PDF

for a star collapsing on itself. All that light and brightness and warmth extinguished.
    He closed his eyes, and over the sick, hollow pounding of his heart said hoarsely, “No.”
    “I’m sorry. What was that?”
    “No.”
    “Why not let me look at them?” Bernard persisted. “They might be better than you think. They almost certainly are. You were always far too harsh a—”
    The laugh that tore its way out of Swift’s chest shocked them both.
    But…truly? The poems he wrote after he learned his father had died? The poems that narrated the end of his two-year struggle to keep clean? The poems he wrote in that final, despairing plummet to self-destruction? How could anyone even ask?
    “I can’t.”
    “But—”
    Just for an instant the close rein Swift kept on himself slipped. “No one is ever going to see those poems. Not while I’m alive.”
    Bernard’s silence was stricken. He said, “Swift, dear boy. I didn’t mean—”
    “I know.”
    “I thought perhaps time had—”
    “I realize. But no.”
    “Of course. It’s completely your decision.” Pause. “But the poems do still exist?”
    If Swift started laughing, it was liable to turn into something else. He flattened all emotion out of his response. “Yes. And after I’m dead you can do whatever you like with them. You’re my literary executor, Bernard.”
    “Don’t joke about that.”
    “It’s okay. I’m not planning on going anywhere. You’re going to have a long wait to get your clutches on my greatest works.”
    He was trying to lighten the mood, but Bernard wasn’t laughing. Maybe the bad old days when Swift’s imminent self-annihilation loomed over their heads were still too close.
    Bernard cleared his throat and said in apparent non sequitur, “I saw Marion in Bermuda.”
    “Did you?” Swift asked without interest.
    “She was vacationing there with Ralph. She looks well.”
    Ralph. Swift stared out the rain-blurred window. “She always does.”
    Bernard’s hesitation stretched the distance between them. “She seems happy.”
    “Good for her. Damn. There’s the bell. I’ll talk to you later, Bernard.”
    “Yes, all right,” Bernard said hastily, “but Swift at least, well…at least consider Fountainhead’s offer.”
    “I’ll think about it,” Swift lied.
     
     
    There was no phone at the bungalow on Orson Island, and for the first time Swift regretted that. He wished it was possible to cancel his afternoon seminar, but sticking to his routine had become second nature by now. He didn’t like to diverge from his road into the yellow wood. It always felt slightly perilous. More perilous some days than others.
    Lunch was spent at a local coffeehouse grading more papers. There was a lot more grading papers in teaching than he’d originally anticipated. He didn’t mind. He actually found a lot of the stuff kids wrote amusing. Had he ever been that young? That naïve?
    He listened with half an ear to the conversations around him—most of which sooner or later touched on the murder of Mario Corelli. Corelli’s restaurant was a popular and successful one, and its owner was well known in Stone Coast. His wife Nerine was currently running for mayor, although there was speculation that she might drop out of the race now.
    Swift ate his clam chowder bread bowl, mechanically marked papers, and absorbed the delightfully shocked conversations flowing around him. Popular opinion was that Tad had killed his old man. Max was right. The Corellis hadn’t enjoyed quite the warm relationship Swift had with his father, but that didn’t mean Tad had killed Mario. It didn’t mean that hearing about Mario’s death wouldn’t be a terrible shock. It didn’t mean he hadn’t loved his father.
    Swift needed to get to the island and talk to Tad. He wasn’t going to make his mind up about anything until he’d heard Tad out.
    So he spooned his soup, graded papers and refused to think of anything else.
    After lunch Swift returned to